In January 2025, Donald Trump, the newly inaugurated U.S. president, signed an executive order directing the U.S. armed forces to construct a missile defense system called the “Golden Dome,” aimed at establishing space weapons in orbit for the first time in history.
Legitimized in part by the expiry of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia on February 5, Trump placed the cost of the Golden Dome—which Russia called “highly provocative”—at around $175 billion, though congressional estimates have put the real cost at more than a trillion dollars.
Lockheed Martin—which stands to profit massively from Golden Dome’s construction—asserted on its website that Golden Dome for America is a “revolutionary concept to further the goals of peace through strength and President Trump’s vision for deterring adversaries from attacks on the homeland. This next generation defense shield will identify incoming projectiles, calculate trajectory and deploy interceptor missiles to destroy them mid-flight, safeguarding the homeland and projecting American strength.”[1]
A more critical assessment was provided by Theodore Postol, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicist and former Pentagon weapons adviser who, in a January YouTube lecture, called Trump’s Golden Dome a “total delusion” and “crazy idea” with “no merit.”
Postol said that the actual cost of the Golden Dome should be in the ballpark of $10 to $15 trillion and that there is not much likelihood that the system would even be functional if that amount were spent.
The reason is because the Russians and Chinese are likely to develop counter-measures that would nullify the impact of space-based interceptors that are at the heart of the Golden Dome, and because the creation of debris would destroy the interceptors and other space-based satellite systems the U.S. has set up.
Though Trump promised that the Golden Dome would be built in three years, little work has actually been done so far because of technological and logistical hurdles that even current senior Pentagon officials consider to be “insurmountable.”[2]
Postol began his lecture by noting that the Golden Dome would add a space-based component to the already-existing, ground-based U.S. missile defense system in which newly created interceptors orbiting the Earth would have the capacity to shoot down nuclear-armed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) fired at the U.S. mainland.
Part of the novelty is that the space-based interceptors would have the capability of detecting decoy missiles the ground-based system could not differentiate from missiles with real warheads.
Postol said, however, that the missile interceptors would have to be replaced every six or seven years, after which time they would normally slow down and fall into the atmosphere.
Also, to stop just one ICBM, between 1,000 and 1,200 interceptors would have to be created. Thus, to stop 100, which Russia and China are capable of firing, about 120,000 interceptors would have to be developed—at a ridiculously high cost
Trump’s Golden Dome system attempts to revitalize Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or “Star Wars,” which proposed creation of space battle stations from which direct energy and laser weapons set off by a hydrogen bomb were to be refracted through large mirrors and guided by internal computers and sensors that could be deployed against incoming ballistic missiles and nuclear war-heads.
SDI was influenced by alarmist CIA proclamations of the Soviet military “threat” put out by Team B—a renegade group of defense intellectuals directed by CIA Director George H. W. Bush and his deputy, Theodore Shackley, and headed by CIA-linked Harvard Professor Richard Pipes.
SDI’s former Deputy of Technology, Michael D. Griffin, an aerospace engineer and former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) executive, formed the Space Development Agency during the first Trump administration, which worked on the development of a space-based missile tracking system that is to be further developed under the Golden Dome.[3]
Postol was a Pentagon adviser in the 1980s when SDI was initiated and called it “ridiculous” and a “hallucination”—much like Trump’s Golden Dome.
When he was working at the Pentagon, Postol said that he was “absolutely stunned” by the reaction of “otherwise technically informed people” who “accepted SDI and were even overjoyed by it.”
Postol noted this was a radicalizing experience for him that made him “realize how people in government follow orders” and “don’t think for themselves.” If they did the latter, he said, “they would be pushed aside—if they are lucky.”
After a speech by Reagan on SDI, Postol saw a senior Navy Captain that he knew, Linton Brooks who served as Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security from 2002 to 2007, dancing while proclaiming that SDI would save lives. When Postol asked Brooks “where is the science,” Brooks “literally froze” and otherwise had no response.
Dr. Richard Garwin, author of the first hydrogen bomb design, was part of a network of nuclear physicists in the 1980s who called for banning weapons in space and referred to Ronald Reagan as “Darth Vader” after the Star Wars villain.[4]
The same designation applies equally well to Donald Trump, whose dream of weaponizing Outer Space follows an old Nazi plan that was brought to the U.S. with the recruitment of Nazi scientists after World War II under Operation Paperclip.[5]
Besides all the money it could bring to their benefactors, the Golden Dome concept makes America’s political elite feel good for supposedly protecting Americans while they are ratcheting up the threat of conflict with Russia, China and other nuclear-armed powers like North Korea.
The peace movement should not just mobilize to oppose Golden Dome and the militarization of Outer Space, but also the confrontational policies being adopted by Donald Trump and his Democratic Party counterparts who have compromised national security and hence require greater investment in missile defense.
Companies such as BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, RTX, General Atomics, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX were tapped by the Pentagon, along with Lockheed, to work on the Golden Dome system. SpaceX is considered a front-runner to build most of the system in partnership with software maker Palantir and drone maker Anduril. Musk gave around a quarter of a billion dollars to help get Trump elected president. Defense One reported that several universities were deemed eligible alongside defense companies to bid on contracts related to the Golden Dome. The universities include Northern Arizona University, New York University, and the University of Dayton in Ohio. ↑
White House spokesman Anna Kelly claimed erroneously that “great progress has been made in executing this innovative project, and the president looks forward to its competition in order to protect our homeland for generations to come.” One problem is that Golden Dome will require buy-in from key allies, such as Canada and Greenland, to use Arctic radars and airspace to track incoming missiles. ↑
Griffin has been questioned about his close ties and favoritism toward Elon Musk. After traveling to Russia with a young Musk in 2001 to study ICBMs, Griffin steered $2 billion in NASA contracts to Musk’s newly founded space company. SpaceX has since secured missile-tracking satellite contracts through Griffin’s SDA as part of its Starshield program. Griffin also serves as an adviser to Castelion, a startup founded by former SpaceX executives that seeks to mass-produce hypersonic weapons. ↑
Jerry Pournelle and Dean Ing, Mutual Assured Survival: ICBM’s Will Soon Be Obsolete (New York: Baen Books, 1984), 86. Some supporters of SDI, including Lyndon Larouche, a backchannel for President Reagan on this policy, conceived of it as a science-driven joint endeavor of the United States and the Soviet Union to develop a defensive system that would supersede nuclear weapons. ↑
See Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Boston: Little, Brown, 2014). The U.S. is known to have recruited Nazi scientists like Wernher von Braun under Operation Paperclip to help develop the U.S. space program. Space satellites are considered especially valuable because they can identify minerals and oil deposits that U.S corporations want to exploit around the world. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
